PuppeteerSharp VS playwright-dotnet

PuppeteerSharp

Otherwise, any pdf to hml chromium based solution hosted via docker, like gotenberg](https://github.com/gotenberg/gotenberg) or browserless.io(which is free if you create open source). Generating pdfs from html directly in .NET was always a pain. Wkhtml (and wrappers that use it) uses WebKit and comes with a load of issues of its own, similar to running and styling anything in Safari. Using chromium based engine saves a lot of time as it's the most popular way of doing it these days. You can also use puppeteer-sharp with local chromium if you host your app on something that allows it(f.e. not Azure Functions).

Puppeteer Sharp is a port of the popular Headless Chrome NodeJS API built by Google. Puppeteer Sharp was written in C# and released in 2017 by Darío Kondratiuk to offer the same functionality to .NET developers.

there is a dotnet package for using headless chrome: https://www.puppeteersharp.com/ its a port of the nodejs package of the same name

For the actual conversion of html to pdf we use PuppeteerSharp (https://www.puppeteersharp.com ) but you need browserless for that, which requires an api key (don’t know the pricing)

The README in the GitHub site has been good enough for me: https://github.com/hardkoded/puppeteer-sharp

Iv'e been using https://github.com/hardkoded/puppeteer-sharp for html to pdf conversion for quite some time with success. (in both .net framework and .net core)

Just generate HTML and use https://github.com/hardkoded/puppeteer-sharp to produce a PDF from headless Chrome.

Another idea is to maybe generate the document as HTML first and then convert the HTML to a PDF (with somehting like PuppeteerSharp. I have found this more flexible in the past, but I have not personally done with with nested tables.

Playwright

Check out Playwright which is developed by Microsoft. It's like Selenium, but newer and maybe better. You can use it outside unit tests as a regular library.

SDET? Check out Playwright's .NET connector: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-dotnet

I'd suggest looking into https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-dotnet, it has been so much nicer to work with than Selenium.

I believe playwright can do the job, https://playwright.dev/dotnet/

Then you'd take that output and generate a PDF with Chrome: https://playwright.dev/dotnet/

If you've already got ASP.NET generating pages then you should try use this to save pages as PDF: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-dotnet

If you've ever wanted to pull data periodically from a website, or you are a QA automation person looking to do E2E (end to end) testing, then Playwright might be an option for you. Similar to Cypress or PhantomJS, Playwright is a library that allows you to automate ineractions with websites, you can even take screenshots and PDFs!